I wrote this post this past summer… for a friend. It was written in response to something she had written. It didn’t feel like the right time to release it then, but I sense that perhaps it is useful now:

I read your post on the edge of my chair… a feeling of tightness in my throat… your words a little blurry through my somewhat misty eyes. I finished with a sigh, a nodding half-smile, and my shoulders were a little lower.

Sometimes the planets just seem to align, and we get the messages when we need them to give us the strength to carry on. The people we need most step up, and fate, or the goodness of the world, or plain old luck puts them in our path. I suppose relief is too strong a word. It is more continued hope, combined with a sense that you have been true to your heart as a mom. You are brave and full of love for your child, and I suspect that I am not the only one full of awe and admiration for you.

I sense a perhaps-budding of the a way of thinking that this is not an ending – but the beginning of something else. This is hard to see when you are trying still to navigate your way through the hardest day you have yet lived. Hard to imagine the possibilities of something better, when you are steeling yourself against pain that I can only imagine.

I will keep you and your sweet boy in my thoughts…

Yin and Yang in the Atmosphere

It seems
you have been weathering
quite a few storms of late…
and now the skies
might be clearing a bit
calming
a shaft of light here and there
storms will come again
but so will the light
maybe a partially sunny sky
not perfect blue perhaps
but anyhow…
at the end of the day
I cling
determined
to the image
that it’s the presence of clouds
that make the sunset spectacular

Leah Kelley – August 2011

___________________________________________________

30 Days of Autism is a project designed to fight stigma, promote civil rights, and increase understanding and acceptance for those who process and experience the world differently.

©Leah Kelley, Thirty Days of Autism (2011)